Director: Naoyuki Tomomatsu
Year: 2014
Country: Japan
Alternate Titles: Reipu zonbi: Lust of the dead - arata naru zetsubô
Genre: Zombie, Exploitation
Plot:
Convinced of the final outcome, a team of scientists travel back in time to stop the spread of a virus turning men into zombified rapists through society and causes them to finally uncover the source of the deadly disease which causes them to attempt to stop it before it happens again.
Review:
For the final franchise entry, this was somewhat problematic. The film's biggest problem is the fact that this one really makes no sense at all as to what's going on as there's a serious misuse of time travel. Supposedly going back to previous entries in the series to alter how the timeline played out, this one makes a rather irritating error in having repeat showings of the scenes that originally happened and then having the new footage of the actors observing rather than taking an active intervention in the proceedings. This creates an incredibly sloppy situation where it really makes the film feel redundant by not doing anything new with the material as instead it just rehashes the same scenes all over again. Regardless of how much fun it was to revisit those particular scenes, this approach simply causes the beginning to feel like stock footage rather than attempting anything new with the story as was attempted in the previous installment.
Moreover, the manner in which it features the two traveling back throughout the different time periods in the franchise is laughably inconsistent and never makes any sense as it just shows them running in slow motion through the backgrounds and then just appearing in stock footage apparently meant to show the previous actions. That in effect causes this one to really diminish the amount of newfound action with the zombies here as it tends to feature the same scenes all over again and never attempts anything new with them. The attempts at time travel take up a large portion of this one and it causes the film to drastically overlook the zombie footage to the point of barely even featuring any new zombie footage at all here so the action doesn't have the same impact.
It still has the major problematic issues as before in that the ease with which it indulges in topics like the continued rape and exploitation on display which does make this one somewhat hard to get through. As well, there's also the fact that this one tends to feature the same utterly atrocious CGI effects that are just laughably awful and never really offer any kind of realistic actions throughout here which really lowers this one considerably. It still has a few positives, as the flashback scenes give this a plethora of nudity and sleazy gore so it still works on those levels. Likewise, the fact that it manages to touch on the topic of suicide and bullying in a rather honest and open manner gives this something else to look forward to as there are some worthwhile effects on that topic that are brought up and make for a somewhat powerful statement here. Otherwise, there's not a whole lot to this one.
Overview: */5
While there are a few worthwhile elements to be found here, the fact that this one tends to play like a greatest hits package of the previous entries without much new material here makes this one a bit of a struggle to get through. You've already seen the best bits taken from this one elsewhere so unless you're dead-set on finishing out the franchise then stick with the other entries and heed caution with this one.
This review was originally published on Asian Movie Pulse and is gratefully reprinted with their cooperation.
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